The Battle Over Stieg Larsson’s Estate Intensifies

In his column in V.F.’s December 2009 issue, Christopher Hitchens examined the Swedish literary sensation Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004, at age 50—before the first book in his wildly successful “Millennium” trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was published. Because Larsson never made a will and never married his longtime companion and collaborator, Eva Gabrielsson, Gabrielsson did not inherit the rights to his work or any part of his reported $30 million estate, and she has been embroiled in a bitter feud with Larsson’s father and brother for several years.

Two days ago London’s Daily Mail published a wide-ranging profile of Gabrielsson in which she makes some shocking statements and revelations:

• On the legal wrangling over Larsson’s work: “It is like someone selling your children [and] placing them in any old whorehouse for the rest of their lives.”

• On what shaped Larsson’s staunch feminist views: “When he was 14 he witnessed his friends gang-rape a girl. He couldn’t stop it.”

• On her antagonists, Larsson’s father and brother: “It was as if Erland [Larsson] was a distant relative, rather than [Stieg’s] father. Stieg disliked him to the extent that I had no idea even when his brother got married or had children. None of his colleagues at Expo [the magazine Larsson founded] knew of his brother either.”

To read Christopher Hitchens’s article, “The Author Who Played With Fire,” click here.